The Light of Day

My first tera

My first tera…

Hooray!

Pieces parts

Some “blogging music”, maestro:

Thank you, sir. I doubt many of you happen to know the 1998 version of TFBD forwards and backwards, but this is the backing track from Scratched Off, Called Off — or, on earlier versions, Listed Black — right off the old worn-out tape, before I’ve had much of a chance to revitalize it. One recurring regret is that I tended to have “too much fun” with the sequencer back then (circa 1994) — lots of experimenting with ridiculous polyrhythms and other “mathy” ideas, just because I could — often at the expense of the overall aesthetic. In the case of this song, though, I think the arrangement works perfectly. You can clearly hear that there’s space in the sound where the vocals would go. It’s also refreshing to have music that isn’t emotionally overwhelming; it’s just a sonic backbone for a degrading dialogue between three jerks.

The overdubbed instruments on the original tape, i.e. the guitars (and that short REAL CLARINET OMG phrase at 1:16), were all apparently bounced together with the sequenced drums/bass/keys onto a single stereo pair, to open as many tracks as possible for vocal work — so if I’m not totally happy with the guitar tone as it is, tough titties.

Some early observations on the movie project (still in the “scavenger hunt” phase):

1. It doesn’t matter that I can’t see the entire movie in my head at once. All I need to see is the next thing I’m going to do. This much is easy. Each time I do the next thing, I can see a little further in my mind, and keep following where it leads me.

2. While props and costumes accumulate, and parts of the puzzle are coming together, the project is alive. While something sits at one end of the room, untouched for days on end, the eyes stop seeing it, and the project slips into a coma.

3. Visuals don’t hide music or detract from its flaws; they either resonate with it — magnifying and compounding what it already has — or just don’t go with it. If the music is kinda stupid, then the visual has to be kinda stupid. “Music visualization” is somewhat of a misnomer. We can’t see music, so there’s no such thing as one absolute correct visual to go with it. We can, however, see whether or not something fits the music. So while the music can’t dictate the visuals outright — even generative visuals rely on an algorithm that was developed independently of the music that drives it — the music can act as a test for whatever image we present to it. Sometimes just hearing the music helps to tell us, “this image is almost right, but needs to be fluffier/darker/grainer etc.”

4. I’ve long believed visuals could serve as a sweetener, to help some people swallow my more difficult musical pills — or at least as a distraction, so that people might let down their guards and let in some music that falls outside their usual comfort zone in some way. (Notice that people who complain loudly about certain radio stations never seem to mind when the same music appears in the soundtrack of a movie they’re enjoying.) What didn’t occur to me is that I’d be helping myself to experience this old music in a fresh and vital way, just by having a few tangible props to look at while tweaking the mixes.

Investments

Here are a few of the acquisitions that I’ve funded so far with my “stimulus incentive” rebate…

…just so you don’t think I’m spending it frivolously.

No, I’m not going through an “Elton John” phase, but it’s a good guess, and it’s sort of in the right direction…

Thanks to Sassy for the tip regarding ostrich fringe. (That was October? Christ, someone light a fire under my ass, please!)

Subliminal messages are for the birds

I’m not that far from having a refurbed Leave of Absence vol. 1 for all y’all. (Refurbing volume 2 was one of my side projects last year, so I’m sort of working backwards.) I finally resolved a certain gray-area type copyright issue. The new mix of the offending song (Julie) will be missing part of its original vocal, and in its place will be, uh… something kinda weird. The backing track is generic enough to not even be an issue. I’ll probably list the title of the new mix as Julie Minus Julie. I love odd, cryptic titles like that.

Anyway…

Remixing, in and of itself, should never take terribly long. It’s when something crosses the line from “remixing” to “reworking” that we get sucked into a wormhole, and suddenly it’s ten years later.

Fortunately, Friend in the Room (above) was a relatively straightforward hour-or-two remix, starting with the nearly ready-to-go tracks I’d previously copied over from the old Windows 98 computer. I put some essential stuff like EQ on some tracks, and cut out some hiss between lines on the vocal track. Interestingly, all these years later, I’m hearing not just hiss on that track, but also a bird chirping loudly in the background. It’s likely that I had my window open while recording it, but I don’t remember hearing it while making the original mix. I considered that it might have been a squeaky reel of tape being picked up by the mic, since I was always in the same room with the Fostex, but it sounds too distinctively bird-like. You might be able to hear a bit of it in the middle verse (listen at the end of the line “I never could say”, and the next few lines following it).

If I’d already known it was on there, I wouldn’t think it was any big deal. It’s the fact that the bird planted his easter egg in my song and I didn’t even discover it until a decade later — that’s what impresses me.

Anyway, having both volumes of Leave of Absence in nice, tidy, finalized (for now) form will put a nice, big, guidepost-y dent in my mission to sort out my entire back catalog and make it all available in one convenient online musicfolio. (This will be my new word for “discography”, since it really has nothing to do with discs. I may also start using “collection” in lieu of “album”, but we’ll see about that one.)

Clever ending. Blah blah blah.

R.I.P. Emily Junior

It’s never fun to lose a fuzzy buddy.

She just couldn’t make it through another surgery. Think a happy thought for her the next time you eat noodles. She loved them noodles.

String binding

After a quick Googling of “keep guitar in tune”, it seems like there are too many incomplete answers out there, so I’d like to address a specific case of the problem that I’ve put up with for years.

If the guitar’s intonation is basically decent overall, and the strings have already been stretched, but a.) strings shift flat immediately after bending, and b.) strings shift sharp immediately after pushing down the tremolo bar, this is a problem called “string binding”. It means there’s just enough friction in the grooves of the nut to prevent the tension from completely evening out on either side of it. When you bend, a tiny bit of string slides away from the headstock towards the body and “sticks” there. The reverse is true for a whammy dive. It’s not subtle; in fact, it can make the guitar outright unplayable unless you just strum chords and stop trying to play rock star.

For those of us who want to play rock star, Sound On Sound has a great little paragraph tucked away in an obscure article from a zillion years ago. Scroll down to “NON-STICK GUITAR NUT”. Key points: 1.) It’s not supposed to stick. (I actually wasn’t sure if it was supposed to “not stick” or “stick better”, but the former seems more logical, since we do actually have to turn the tuning pegs now and then.) 2.) People with graphite nuts are lucky. And last but not least, 3.) you can lubricate your nut — on your guitar, gutterbrain — by “placing a single layer of plumber’s PTFE tape over the nut before you fit your next set of strings”.

(You can of course trim the tape if you’re vain and superficial.)

To all the people out there who list “strings being too old” as a cause of bad intonation, what universe are you living in? Strings may lose a lot of their timbral majesty when they get old, but in my experience they don’t become harder to keep in tune. Maybe it’s harder to hear if they’re in tune or not because they have such a dull sound?

Homegrown spectral analyzer

I whipped this spectral analyzer up this weekend. Unfortunately, like everything else coded in Handyland, it doesn’t run in realtime; it has to be rendered as a movie first and then re-synced to the music. I think it’s fun to sit and watch when it’s done, though. Sometimes, if you look hard enough (or sniff enough glue), you can see which peaks correspond to which sounds.

The featured instrumental here is Kid in a Candy Store, from Leave of Absence vol. 1, currently close to being ready for reissue. It was created by slapping a backwards orchestra track onto a drum track, relishing in the serendipity, and then coming up with bass, guitar, and piano bits that would glue it together a little more. This is the music I want playing when the aliens come to pick me up.

Maybe a graphic as simple as this, in combination with lyrics and/or factoids, would lend itself to my earlier idea of using YouTube as an audio player. My only gripe is that I would have to use a workaround if I want the music to be in stereo — at least until YouTube realizes it’s not 1950 anymore.